Skill Progression and Starting Levels

[Riev]

I still say that skills should have a percentage chance to go up on success. I love, love, LOVE the fail system. I think its a great way to put people at "passable average" in a short amount of time, and allow people who work hard to get to the higher levels.

However, if there was even a 2% chance to skill up on using a skill, this would help combat, sneakies, crafting, everything. Sure, you still want to get fails in to "skill up bruh" but you wouldn't be -as- worried and have to RP around "Well, I stole from that guy... but... I didn't get my fail... so really I didn't do much"

[AdamBlue]

Not to mention that sometimes you need to do hilarious, possibly stupid things in order to achieve your failures when you're going for that last bit.

[Delirium]

The more I think about it, I really think the best solution is a three-pronged approach:

1) Introduce a moderate percentage chance for a skill to go up on use, regardless of success or failure,
2) Make weapons skills somewhat easier to raise (not a lot, but, somewhat easier).
3) Revisit what branches from where, and when, or maybe add/switch branches to address potential balance issues due to the above, such as:
   o Maybe backstab should branch from sap
   o Perhaps weapon skills should branch at a lower skill level
   o Start burglars with lockpick making, then branching lockpicking from that.

The examples attached to #3 are just me spitballing, so you can see where I'm going with it.

[Desertman]

The more I think about it, I really think the best solution is a three-pronged approach:

1) Introduce a moderate percentage chance for a skill to go up on use, regardless of success or failure,
2) Make weapons skills somewhat easier to raise (not a lot, but, somewhat easier).
3) Revisit what branches from where, and when, or maybe add/switch branches to address potential balance issues due to the above, such as:
  o Maybe backstab should branch from sap
  o Perhaps weapon skills should branch at a lower skill level
  o Start burglars with lockpick making, then branching lockpicking from that.

The examples attached to #3 are just me spitballing, so you can see where I'm going with it.

I like these with the exception of number three in regards to burglars.

I'm not sure how much realistic sense it makes to start making tools to pick locks before you understand how to even pick locks.

It's a bit like making tools to fix engines before you know how to fix engines.

If the issue is playability and not realism, then I agree...it would make being a burglar a lot easier.

[Dresan]

  o Start burglars with lockpick making, then branching lockpicking from that.

Wtih extended sub-guilds being what they are, I've had this idea myself. However not so much branch, mostly because that would defeat the purpose of characters being able to do more out from the start. However i see no reason why burgalars can't just start out being able to make the tools they need to practice using.

[Narf]

  o Start burglars with lockpick making, then branching lockpicking from that.

Wtih extended sub-guilds being what they are, I've had this idea myself. However not so much branch, mostly because that would defeat the purpose of characters being able to do more out from the start. However i see no reason why burgalars can't just start out being able to make the tools they need to practice using.

I'm not for or against this particularly but a bit of background: It used to be that burglars could start picking locks right from the get go with no need to go out and hunt down lockpicks.

At some point someone conciously made the change to what it is now. I suspect they had a reason.

[Dresan]

The way i see it, if you role burglar, you should be able to play a burglar without having to stuggle. Building your tools, before testing them out, see what works and what doesn't.  

Now if you didn't start a burglar as your main class, then I can see you having to hunt down tools first.  

[CodeMaster]

The more I think about it, I really think the best solution is a three-pronged approach:

1) Introduce a moderate percentage chance for a skill to go up on use, regardless of success or failure,
2) Make weapons skills somewhat easier to raise (not a lot, but, somewhat easier).
3) Revisit what branches from where, and when, or maybe add/switch branches to address potential balance issues due to the above, such as:
  o Maybe backstab should branch from sap
  o Perhaps weapon skills should branch at a lower skill level
  o Start burglars with lockpick making, then branching lockpicking from that.

The examples attached to #3 are just me spitballing, so you can see where I'm going with it.

I like these with the exception of number three in regards to burglars.

I'm not sure how much realistic sense it makes to start making tools to pick locks before you understand how to even pick locks.

It's a bit like making tools to fix engines before you know how to fix engines.

I hate the sound of my pedantic voice when I write stuff like this, but lockpicking is way lower tech than fixing an engine, it's more akin to knitting or belaying a climber.  You can improvise crude tools before your first attempt with no real specialized knowledge and achieve limited success.

But I agree overall -- it might be fun for new burglars if they branched lockpicking immediately after a few (3, or 4) lockpick crafting attempts, just as a show that their character is ruminating about the subject.

[solera]

Burglars, well realistically yes. But. I like it the way it is. I like the game not making it easy to become a professional house-breaker, and that you need lots of  sids or need to put yourself out to make contacts. That's what this game is about?

[Dresan]

I thought this game was about Murder, Corruption and Betrayal.

I dunno, I just think this game has much more to offer then to make people struggle to get good at the skills that defines their guilds.  

[solera]

It is. You have to get tied to people before you can MCB them, unless you play random.

[Dresan]

It is. You have to get tied to people before you can MCB them, unless you play random.

As I said, this sounds great if you didn't start off as a burglar. However, it shouldn't be a freaking struggle uphill if those 'people' aren't around or weren't around when the game reset.

If that burglar wanted to then become a world renown hunter, then yes, let the uphill struggle and grind begin.

[solera]

How about we change the name and call them a spy?
But , getting back to the topic, slow skill gain suits me fine, (never played a warrior), but lots of players it doesn't. Delirium's suggestions all sound sensible.

[Dar]

Perhaps these ideas were already mentioned, this is a very long thread that I am only now joining.

Mentorship systems.
A high skilled PC can place a flag on other PCs which registers them as apprentices underneath them. After that is done, the mentor needs to perform a training session and issue some other flag type command 'lesson apprentice' with a delay of say ... 1 rl week. After 6 such lessons, the apprentice gets a 'significant' (1/8th of teacher's own skill percentage?) boost in their skills, while a teacher gains 2% gain boost per student.  People can be apprenticed only under one singular person, accepting mentorship from someone else, nulls all lessons received and removes them from that mentor's lesson plan.

People of similar skill can potentially be each other's mentor/apprentices. In which case this is more of a collaborative method of self teaching and experimenting. Of course if 6 people of one tribe become each other apprentice/teachers while each one has 10 points in their skills. Then after 6 rl weeks, one of them will gain 12% gain, while the rest 1-2%.

Add a requirement, that a mentor only receives his bonuses from lessons done in at least 50% assembly. So if a mentor has 6 students and must teach them 6 times, but across all of his lectures he only has 50% people near him at each time. He will only receive 50% of the skill gain. While the students, even if taught separately gain the full amount. 

[Dalmeth]

Understand the core problem here :

People want to keep busy.  The game aspects are here to keep us busy until something social pops up.  Some of the games are social activities themselves.  Because we cannot envision a society that keeps us busy and engaged, we add games to the fringes.

So.  Let's play the game.  I'm tired of suggesting solutions to problems that don't have to exist.

[Dresan]

The core problem is that there are better things to in RL then spend your time grinding again and agian. And then people wonder why no one wants to take any risks or risk death by interacting with others in dangerous situations.  

[BadSkeelz]

The core problem is that there are better things to in RL then spend your time grinding again and agian. And then people wonder why no one wants to take any risks or risk death by interacting with others in dangerous situations.  

Yep, that sounds about right.

[Jave]

The core problem is that there are better things to in RL then spend your time grinding again and agian. And then people wonder why no one wants to take any risks or risk death by interacting with others in dangerous situations.  

Yep, that sounds about right.

I can sympathize with the desire to want to start your character more advanced without having to put the time into it, but since it would happen to everyone and not only you, I don't think you'd notice any significant change.

I imagine that if we raised the bar on what new characters roll out of the hall of kings stat'd with, then expectations would just rise in lockstep and we'd be back in a thread like this voicing that we need higher starting skills in short order.

I mean, for example: Right now scrabs mop the floor with a new character. So we increase their skills so scrabs are the new tregil. Now everyone hunts scrabs. The shops are full of scrab goods. New characters can't earn money from scrabs because everyone has flooded the markets with them so they have to press deeper into the wilderness to find more dangerous animals that the shops don't have lots of components from. Those animals kill the new characters because they don't have the skills to fight them yet. Another thread is started addressing the frustrations with not being able to be a competent hunter out of the gate and asking for skills to be raised so that the new type of critter can be handled by a starting level character.

Same for PvP: Every single recruit in the clan is also going to have these increased skills so your character is still going to have their clocked cleaned by those who have been in the clan for a longer period of time and you're still going to feel like it's a grind to get your character up to a point where they can hold their own in the sparring circle against their peers and be considered competent in their skills. Another thread is born voicing frustrations felt about it taking too much time for their character to be considered useful to their clan.

It seems to me like we're just drawing lines in the sand here in terms of where to start a new character, but the time it takes to move from "new" (whatever that is) to "seasoned" (whatever that is) will be unaffected.

I think boosting skills for a character is only going to make a discernible difference to the player if they are the only one receiving the skill boost and everyone else is still starting fresh. Then you'd notice a big difference. And you can already do this with the karma/special application based skill bumping we do now.

[BadSkeelz]

I'm just gonna keep drinking and do other things until I need to login.

[Dresan]

As it has been discussed before, its not just about making people be able to fight meks as soon as they are created. You can give a character all the boosts you want and chances are they will still die to the first beetle they encounter, because no one here has ever asked to raise defense/offense skills.

There are alot of skills in this game which are terrible until you slowly grind them to their max potential. Hide,sneak, archery, steal...just to name a few off the top of my head. It can take 5 days of my life to get so many skills to be valuable. At 30 years old a ranger should be able to shoot things down. Again, its totally cool that scrab/raptor/beetle might still beat the shit out of amos the hunter if he walks into it, but if he plays it smart like a hunter should he should be able to -hunt- it. And its like this with so many classes.

And when you finally finally begin to sneak/hunt/steal effectively, basically do the stuff your class was designed to do, potentially beginning to do some more interesting things, be useful and competant to others... people here ask you to hang around to see if someone wants to charge you down and have you start again from nothing.

I shouldn't have to wait up to 6 days and use a special app(3 yearly max), just to avoid being bored out of my mind with the same old grind.

[Jave]

I understand why you feel frustrated, but I don't think the solution you're suggesting would actually address the source of your frustration, for the reasons I outlined above.

I'll touch on an additional few things though.

As it has been discussed before, its not just about making people be able to fight meks as soon as they are created. You can give a character all the boosts you want and chances are they will still die to the first beetle they encounter, because no one here has ever asked to raise defense/offense skills.

Along that same experimental vein that led me to test low-skill/high stat warriors against high skill/low stat warriors, I also tested a mage (no combat skills) against a journey level warrior. Equal stats, but I maxed the mage's offense and defense to as high as it's possible for them to be, and they still lost in a straight up melee fight against the warrior. -- I think you may be over estimating the extent to which offense/defense factor into combat compared with the more specialized combat skills.

There are alot of skills in this game which are terrible until you slowly grind them to their max potential. Hide,sneak, archery, steal...just to name a few off the top of my head. It can take 5 days of my life to get so many skills to be valuable. At 30 years old a ranger should be able to shoot things down. Again, its totally cool that scrab/raptor/beetle might still beat the shit out of amos the hunter if he walks into it, but if he plays it smart like a hunter should he should be able to -hunt- it. And its like this with so many classes.

And when you finally finally begin to sneak/hunt/steal effectively, basically do the stuff your class was designed to do, potentially beginning to do some more interesting things, be useful and competant to others... people here ask you to hang around to see if someone wants to charge you down and have you start again from nothing.

I shouldn't have to wait up to 6 days and use a special app(3 yearly max), just to avoid being bored out of my mind with the same old grind.

Emphasis mine. We have to put the line in the sand somewhere on that issue. We can't let everyone start the game with a heavy coded advantage over other new characters all the time or, as I mentioned above, the benefit that provides becomes meaningless.

[Inks]

I 100% agree with Jave's previous two posts.

[Lizzie]

One solution, if you don't feel that the grind is fun when you play a 30-year-old character, is to play a 16-year-old character instead.

The game offers choices. The game shouldn't have to change the code just to accommodate your desire to play a buffed-up 30-year-old warrior. Everyone starts out low, everyone has to work their way up. You can try playing a young character or -

You could say your character used to do something else but due to [bio mention] he doesn't any more, and shows up at chargen having decided to do this instead. He is physically capable of it (read: playable stats and the skills are actually on his skills list), now he just has to figure out how.

[whitt]

One solution, if you don't feel that the grind is fun when you play a 30-year-old character, is to play a 16-year-old character instead.

The game offers choices. The game shouldn't have to change the code just to accommodate your desire to play a buffed-up 30-year-old warrior. Everyone starts out low, everyone has to work their way up. You can try playing a young character or -

Because "Everyone starts out low" the game doesn't offer choices.  You can only start out as an incompetent.  So, rather than the code being able to (not having to) allow for some leeway in starting skill level, character backgrounds have to (not may need to) be warped to provide some explanation for any one other than a youth entering the stage with no coded ability to have survived the last "x" years of their existence.

I don't think folks are asking to start out at "Journeyman".  Just not at "Novice" for their guild's primary skills.  That level of fail for anyone who might claim to have made a living at their guilded skills is simply improbable. 

I imagine that if we raised the bar on what new characters roll out of the hall of kings stat'd with, then expectations would just rise in lockstep and we'd be back in a thread like this voicing that we need higher starting skills in short order.

I don't believe this is true either.  I don't see folks asking to be rock stars.  Only to not suck at their guild's primary skills.  Not sure how starting every (not special app'd characters) at the bottom of Apprentice is that impacting to the overall state of things.  Especially if this level of bump is to all primary guilds for all characters.  It just means that if you're playing a fighter, you can beat a non-fighter right out of char-gen and if you're playing a merchant you can maybe only fail 75% of the time instead of 90% of the time. 

[Dresan]

Yes, thats exactly right, Lizzie I think the game should completely change the code to just suit my personal desire...thats been the point of everyone posting in this entire thread.  

Your solution is one possibiltiy but let me offer another more common solution, people can instead 'take a break' and then come back when weeks, months, years from now instead when they don't mind grinding once or twice more before leaving again.

@Jave

Its really about balance, no one said the other skills were useless. A character with just offense and defense and no other skills losing to a warrior with maxed combat skills? No kidding, but the point was that you believed loading up a character with skills would make the world trivial. How about sending an assassin with advanced combat skills and weapons and nothing else up towards a beetle, or many other of the nasties in the game see how they manage.

If all you needed was max shield and high parry to make the NPC world trivial we'd probably be having a different discussion. That was my point. Again no one is saying to allow rangers to be able to one on one meks, or anything bigger then even chalton, but they should have other skills that allow them to hunt them without having to spend days of having to train it. Again its the same with other classes.

It just really just comes down to this, there are much better ways to spend five real life days then to grind these character over and over. There are games out there that offer an enjoyable experience without ever having to pay the price of bordom, and they are very good at competing for our time. This is a permadeath game, and alot of the problems you encounter in this game, like people not wanting to even interact for risk losing their character, not making the world more enjoyable by risking their character is attributed to the fact that starting a character over and over is such a shitty experience. Again some people don't bother learning you name until you've lived for a certain why, something anyone can do easily by going to the tavern and idling(much fun).

Now you can argue that making characters more viable in the beginning isn't the way( and again this has never meant just being able to kill bigger things), that fine, but it doesn't change that fact that it drives people away. I know the 5 day grind to relevancy in my chosen guild is driving me away right now at least, the only time I log in is when I absolutely have nothing to do, and that often includes after I've already played a couple other games.

All that said, I appreciate you responding Jave. I'm not really fustrated, if I felt angry or fustrated I probably wouldn't pose so much as move on quietly. Though I am noticing I spend more time on the GDB then logging in, I'm really thinking I need another 'break' or just reroll something new(uguh).